Attending the Butch Dalisay dialogue on AI, which is how I will refer to it from now on, thankfully gave me something else to ponder outside the national budget brouhaha, which itself was AI-triggered too.
For a few hours, the question was less about public money and more about words. Who makes them? Who owns them? What happens when a machine can produce a decent page before we finish our coffee?
Two old tools helped me think about it: WordStar and the camera.
WordStar made writing easier. If you wanted to move a paragraph, you could move it. You did not have to type the whole page again or attack it with correction fluid. But the software did not give you a point. You still needed something to say.
AI can help with the same problem. People with good ideas do not always have the words to share them. A tool that helps them write clearly can open doors. That matters in a country where polished English can be mistaken for a good brain. A farmer may know more about a food crisis than someone with a beautiful slide deck. A nurse may understand a broken health system better than someone paid to explain it. Their ideas deserve room.
But AI goes beyond WordStar. It can supply the point, the argument, and the stirring last line. Now we have a different problem. Writing is often how we work out what we think. A messy draft can show us a hole in our own argument. Fixing the sentence may require fixing the idea. If we hand over the whole task, we may get better prose and learn less.
The camera offers another lesson.
At the dialogue, we discussed how photography faced doubts about its place in art. Yet people found ways to use the tool to express a view of the world. AI may follow a similar path. Today, we ask whether it can copy a novel, an essay, or a famous writer. Tomorrow, people may use it to create forms of storytelling that feel less like copies. Some will be awful. Some could be great.
We should leave room for both discovery and criticism. We should also leave room for the people who pay the price of change. A new art form does not pay a displaced writer’s rent. Faster output does not settle questions about consent, labor, or truth. Those problems need real answers.
Still, I find the fight over who counts as a “real writer” too narrow. A human can write nonsense. A machine can produce a clear paragraph. Neither fact tells us whether the work deserves our trust. When good sentences become cheap, we need to look behind them.
Who checked the facts? Who knows the subject? Who will answer when the words cause harm? WordStar made the page easier to fix. The camera opened new ways to see.
AI may do both.
We still need to decide what is worth saying, and why anyone should believe us.
(Photo credit: Jaemark Tordecilla)
About Me:
Dominic “Doc” Ligot is one of the leading voices in AI in the Philippines. Doc has been extensively cited in local and global media outlets including The Economist, Channel News Asia, South China Morning Post, Washington Post, and Agence France Presse. His award-winning work has been recognized and published by prestigious organizations such as NASA, Data.org, Digital Public Goods Alliance, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the World Health Organization (WHO), and UNICEF.
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